Monthly Archives: April 2014

Ah, here we are: the mid-season slump. Of course that’s completely expected, especially given the fact that this is about three-quarters of the way through A Storm of Swords and very little in the way of excitement happens between the Purple Wedding and the attack on the Wall (oh, please, they’ve only been leading up to it since Jon and Ygritte’s messy breakup).

But one thing I wasn’t expecting when I sat down to watch this episode was to keep cocking my head to the side and repeatedly whisper to myself, “I have no memory of this place.” Maybe it’s just a long time since I read the books, or maybe the writers added new stuff that I forgot about, but I tremendously dislike being one of you Muggles and not knowing what’s happening now or what’s going to happen next.

In my second year of university, I took a short fiction class. My teacher was an incredible woman who got passionate about our readings, which came from a little paperback called Darwin’s Bastards that for some reason I was embarrassed to read on the bus. This lady was one of the best teachers I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing, and she taught me one important thing that I’ve carried with me into everything I write: the idea of aboutness.

After our first reading, she sat down on her desk and asked us, “What was this story’s aboutness?” Someone began by recapping the plot, but she said, “No, I didn’t ask what the story was about. I want to know what its aboutness was.” Of course none of us had any idea what she meant, so she went on to explain.

When you look at a story, you can look at the plot, think literally, and say, “This story was about a police officer chasing robots.” You can also look at theme, which is a general idea that encompasses the work, whether that’s something like justice or the responsibility of a creator or the meaning of emotions. But if you want to know the aboutness of a story, you have to look deeper. You have to analyze the characters and what makes them tick, and you have to look at the world and why it is the way it is, and you have to pick and poke and delve deep until you find the heart of the story and understand what it’s truly about.

Blade Runner is a story that makes you think about aboutness, and there’s a very good reason for that: it’s impossible to follow the plot, so you have to wax philosophical if you want to stay awake. Keep reading and hear me out.

This week’s episode picks up right where last week’s left off: with a beautiful shot of Joffrey’s horribly distorted dead face. And it’s a good place to begin, because most of the episode is about the aftermath of the Purple Wedding–and the rest is about relationships.

While Cersei is screaming for blood, her dead son in her arms, Sansa is whisked away by Ser Dontos, who is in the employ of–this shouldn’t surprise anyone, given how low profile he’s been lately–Lord Petyr Baelish. He’s busy hanging out on his creepy murder ship, and after Ser Dontos is filled full of crossbow bolts, he turns his charms onto Sansa. Gross.

Baelish tells her that Dontos only saved her because he was paid to, that the only person left in the world who cares about her is himself. Sansa is in a pretty awful situation, because after everything she’s been through lately, she’s gotta be inclined to believe him now that she’s safely (maybe) out of King’s Landing. So it’s pretty creepy to see him leering all over her, poised to take advantage of that trust simply because she’s her mother’s daughter and some people can’t get over failed childhood romances.

All Total Recall images courtesy of Carolco Pictures, StudioCanal, and TriStar Pictures.

At some point in every person’s life, no matter how happy they are, they wish they were someone else. It could be an eight-year-old in math class, dreaming of being a knight fighting off a fearsome dragon in the days of kings and queens. It could be a single mother of three, wanting to be a successful business owner and providing for her family. It could even be something as simple as walking down the street and seeing someone more attractive than yourself, and thinking, “How nice would it be to look like that?”

No matter where we are in time and space, every person wishes, however briefly, that they could walk in someone else’s shoes. So it’s not surprising that Dennis Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger), the main character in the 1990 classic Total Recall, wants that too.

A regular joe, Quaid has a surprisingly slammin’-hot wife played by the ever-foxy Sharon Stone, a job in construction, and constant dreams about him and a brunette woman standing on the barren surface of Mars. His wife pleads with him to forget about Mars, but Quaid can’t shake the desire to walk on the surface of the red planet.

It’s hard to describe what I’m feeling right now as disappointment, even though that’s pretty much accurate. It’s not quite true through, and putting it that way would almost feel like a betrayal, so I don’t think I’m going to. But I’m certainly not satisfied.

If there’s one central theme that Community tends to gather around and circle through its five seasons, it’s the idea of accepting people for all of their quirks. That may not translate to welcoming people with open arms (see: Chang or Todd or Jack Black’s Buddy), but there’s a slow, yet tacit admission throughout the series that every one of our Greendale Seven (and various newcomers and hangers-on) have significant issues and hang-ups (if not outright social disorders). Continue reading →

At long last, the sh*tfaced little turd we’ve all hated ever since that awful night he managed to get Arya’s friend Mycah and Sansa’s direwolf Lady killed is finally freaking dead.

Ring out the bells! Declare a national holiday! I’ve been waiting for this for ages, so it was a relief to finally laugh at Cersei’s wails and point a finger at Joffrey’s purple face, because the sadistic boy-king–the boy responsible for Ned Stark’s death, Ros the prostitute’s murder, not to mention countless instances of terror and torture–is finally, finally dead.

As hopelessly optimistic and cartoonishly heartwarming as Captain America: The First Avenger may have been in telling the story of the greatest hero of our greatest generation, it was tough to swallow that whole pill without noting the bitterness it ended with. If you had any investment in the character at all, it was hard to watch him running through the streets, frantically taking in the sights of a world seventy years his senior, and not feel your heart sink just a little bit as he realizes what’s happened and how far from home he will always be. If you’ll remember, The First Avenger essentially ended with Cap’s musings on missed love, ending the whole film on a bit of a sour note before shunting us off to his first modern mission, a post-credits sequence leading into what was, at the time, our first, best look at the upcoming Avengers movie. It’s that man out of time aspect, that sacrificing it all and wondering at the price, that’s at the heart of the character, and if you don’t get that, if you don’t understand that Steve Rogers is someone who embodies the best of many traditional American values without being a slave to the system, then you’ll never really get the character.

When the exploits of the Save Greendale Committee bring widespread contentment to the entire campus, Abed goes in search of a problem… conflict… a story… anything for this week’s episode to revolve around, breaking down the entire structure of what it means to be on Community.

Given some of the groundbreaking episodes we’ve seen in the series, that sounds like an exciting and landmark episode. It wasn’t. At least not yet.

“Basic Story” is an episode of Community that’s both literally and figuratively in need of direction. Continue reading →